UPI's Pulitzer Prize Winning Photos

Excerpted with permission from Picture This! The Inside Story and Classic Photos of UPI Newspictures(c) 2006, Gary Haynes

1960 PULITZER - ANDREW LOPEZFidel Castro and his Barbudos, or "Bearded Ones”guerillas stormed through Havana in January, 1959, celebrating the fall of hated dictator Fulgencio Batista. Photographer Andrew Lopez was assigned to the war crimes trial at San Severino Castle, a former military installation complete with a moat. Hundreds of Cubans gathered to testify against brutal Batista army corporal Jose Rodriguez, known as "Pepe Caliente." (Hot Pete). “The entire trial took two hours,” Lopez recalls, “(but it took only) one minute for three tribunal judges to condemn Pepe to death.” Pepe was taken to a courtyard where he dropped to his knees as a priest administered last rites. The prosecutor, rebel major Willy Galvez, screamed at Lopez to stop taking pictures. “I was standing there arguing with him, and in the background I could see eight or nine Barbudos waiting for all this to end so they could get on with their business and shoot this guy.” The prosecutor demanded that Lopez surrender his film and Lopez handed over a roll. “I kept the one with Pepe on it," he said.

1961 PULITZER - YASUSHI NAGAOJapan’s political turbulence and an attack on an American contingent making advance arrangements for a 1960 visit by President Eisenhower caused Ike's visit to be cancelled. In October more than 3000 people showed up for major party speeches and a debate about the US-Japan Security Treaty. Photographer Yashushi Nagao was there on assignment for Mainichi Shimbun, his Tokyo newspaper employer. Debating opposite sides were Inejiro Asanuma, chairman of the Japanese Socialist Party, leader of opposition to the US-Japan Security Treaty, and Hayato Ikeda, the Liberal-Democratic Prime Minister. As Asanuma began to speak a man lunged toward him with a two-foot sword. Nagao frantically refocused his camera as the man stabbed Asanuma, withdrew the sword, and prepared to strike again. The photographer watched in horror and froze the moment using the last shot left in his 4x5 film pack. The assassin, Otoya Yamagucha, a right-wing extremist, was captured on the spot. Sentenced to jail, he hanged himself in his cell, and more people attended his funeral than had attended the state service for Asanuma. UPI had exclusive rights to all of Mainichi’s photographs and soon the picture was seen around the world. It won every top U.S. photo award, including the Pulitzer Prize.

1966 PULITZER - KYOICI SAWADAKyoichi Sawada worked in UPI’s Tokyo bureau but wanted to be sent to Vietnam. He even took his vacation there and returned with an impressive set of combat pictures to convince them he was right. In 1965 he was sent to Vietnam where by then 200,000 American combat troops were trying to dislodge the Viet Cong. Caught up in the struggle were four million men, women, and children forced out of their homes as their crops and villages were destroyed. Sawada photographed two mothers struggling for their lives as they tried to get their children to safety across a river while American planes dropped bombs and napalm on their hamlet just beyond the other side. After he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for a portfolio that included this photo, Sawada searched for the two families, with only his photo as a guide. He found both, and he gave each a copy of the photograph -- plus half of his Pulitzer Prize cash award. He kept none of it for himself.The photo also won the World Press Photo Grand Prize, and the Overseas Press Club award. Four years later, October 1970, Sawada and UPI Phnom Penh bureau manager Frank Frosch, in civilian clothing and unarmed, were ambushed by the Vietcong and killed near Phnom Penh.

1968 PULITZER - TOSHIO SAKAIThere was a commotion in the forest,” Toshio Sakai remembers, “then all became silent. Birds stopped chirping and insects quieted. My heart was being fast. A tense atmosphere filled the air.” American soldiers in Vietnam were in an unfamiliar land. They knew that their next step might be their last , on a mine or into a booby trap. They experienced terrifying struggles followed by numbing boredom, but unrelenting anxiety. Unable to lower their guard, they could never really rest. Suddenly, shells explode overhead, and AK-47s crackle. The Viet Cong attack. The Americans return fire and the jungle is abuzz with bullets.The furious battle rages until suddenly the heavens open with a monsoon rain so intense that all shooting stops. The forest is again silent - for minutes, then hours. The deluge continues, the firefight is over.. Weary soldiers hunker down and try to stay dry as best they can in the rain and the mud. “I saw a black soldier on the bunker taking a nap,” Sakai says, “ Behind him I saw another white soldier holding an M-16 rifle, crouching and watching. The sleeping soldier must have dreamt of better times in his homeland.” I quietly released the shutter.”

1972 PULITZER - DAVID HUME KENNERLYDavid Kennerly first had to to convince the Pentagon to release him from the Army reserves so he could go to war, the only such request the brass can recall. Next he had to convince UPI to reassign him from Washington, D. C.. They granted his request in 1971 but told him that “all the Vietnam pictures have been taken.” Not the best ones, it would turn out. Kennerly brought a fresh eye to the conflict, and his portfolio of pictures showing war’s quieter moments earned him the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. “I wanted to show the periphery of war and to depict the people who lived there,” he says. “I took a lot of pictures of bodies and people dying, but I think the feature side – those are some of the best.” His photo of a soldier and battle-shattered trees summed up the barren devastation of the 10-year war and the debate about getting America out of Vietnam that was raging back home in Washington and on America’s streets. “During a lull in the action soldiers grow tense, wondering when the barrage will begin again, and from which direction,” Kennerly says. “The gloomy tableau matched the mood of the men. To me, that was more the war I saw, in terms of the day to day scene. It captures the loneliness and desolation of war.”

1978 PULITZER - JOHN H. BLAIRA deranged borrower captures his mortgage banker. He wires a shotgun to the banker's head and the trigger to himself.Moments after Richard Hall, President of Meridien Mortgage in Indianapolis, arrived for work in February, 1977, he was taken hostage by a dissatisfied customer, Anthony Kristis. The bank had loaned Kiristis money to build a shopping center, but when the loan came due Kiristis couldn’t pay. He claimed that the bank discouraged investors so it could foreclose on the property. Still wired to the shotgun, the banker is taken to Kristis' apartment where over three days the area is an armed camp. Police finally negotiated Hall’s release, and both UPI stringer John Blair and his mentor, UPI’s Indianapolis bureau manager Jim Schweiker, record the moment. “I had phenomenal angles,” Blair recalls. I had three cameras and I used all three.” He was so close he could have reached out and touched the shotgun. UPI would pay Blair $5 for his picture and nominate it for a Pulitzer, but in Schweiker’s name. When Schweiker was announced as the winner, Blair claimed the photo was his. UPI’s Vice President for Newspictures Bill Lyon flew to Evansville, Indiana, examined Blair’s film, and agreed that Blair took the winning picture. Schweiker was encouraged to resign. Although Kiristis was confined to a mental institution, he somehow managed to contact Blair and ask for prints of his picture.

1980 PULITZER - JAHANRIG RAZMIThe Islamic Revolution steamrolled through Iran in January 1979. Ayatolla Khomeini imposed his Shiite Muslim beliefs on the entire country and set about to destroy "corrupt Western influences." "From now on it is I," he decreed, "who will name the government." Four million Kurds didn't like Western influences, either. But they also didn't want to lose their Sunni Muslim faith, and they demanded independence. Khomeini dispatched his Revolutionary Guards to dispense "justice" in mock trials, in the process slaughtering thousands of Kurds. In August, nine Kurdish rebels and two former police officers of the deposed Shah faced a firing squad in Sanandaj, Iran, after being tried and sentenced to death. An Iranian newspaper (Ettela'at) photographer recorded the executions in grim detail. A UPI staffer obtained a copy of the picture and it was transmitted worldwide. For 27 years, the photographer remained the only anonymous recipient of a Pulitzer in the 90-year history of the prizes. He was identified, with his permission, in 2007 by a Wall Street Journal reporter, Joshua Prager, and he received the the $10,000 prize. UPI's 1980 story said “The photographer feared the gunmen might shoot him, so he smuggled the film from the scene in his trouser pocket.”

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